This space is for friends, family and sworn enemies to convene, commiserate and bask in the dim glow of our most deficient public figures. Hopefully we can have some laughs along the way. If we don't, it's your fault.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Make Room for Baby Pt. I

Two nights ago Mrs. Blackwell and I were awakened from our
slumber by an increasingly familiar sound.

The boy popped up at about 1:30 and he was howling mad.

I suppose there are worse silhouettes
that could greet you late at night.

We’ve been fortunate that he’s by and large a solid sleeper.
He gets about 10 to 11 hours a night, but not on this night. He awoke angry,
frustrated, maybe scared but definitely ticked at the world; and he wanted us
to know about it.

Completely ignoring my wait-and-see-if-he-stops-crying
strategy, Mrs. Blackwell went after the boy. As she left the room I
wondered if she’d have any luck quelling his fury.

But as the minutes wore on and the audible anger continued,
I lost hope. I then wondered what her next plan was. I didn’t have to
wait long for my answer.

The crying drew closer, closer and still closer before the
door to our bedroom opened.

Drifting through the doorway was the silhouette of my
wife, backlit by an impossibly bright hallway. In her arms she was holding an angry, gyrating, little old man with hair so wild, so big and disheveled, I questioned if it was the boy or something else.

I’ve seen a version of this before but, I just couldn’t remember
the boy looking so big in her arms. Aside from that increasingly full head of
hair, when we hold him his long legs now dangle somewhere around our thighs and his arms reach far around us.

He's a little weak on the earlier albums but, from the
White Album on, he knows his stuff.

He is, by weight, an average size. But by every other
anatomical quantifiable he is a big boy. This fact is quite clear when he’s sprawled
out in his crib and you see how much less room he has now compared to just a year
ago.

We know placating a child by bringing them to bed could mean a green light for them to use this strategy for eternity. But
when you’re tired and you’ve got work in just a few hours, one can peer through their
sleepless fog to envision a fate far worse than the possibility of rewarding a manipulative child.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a parenting rule — for Mrs. Blackwell and myself that time is 2:13 a.m.

Naturally, the boy immediately perked up once nestled between
Mrs. Blackwell and I. He then commenced to dig into his catalogue of baby
babble, which has grown to include about a third of the song titles in The
Beatles catalogue punctuated with unrelated phrases strung together.